Seduced by a Stranger (24 page)

Dr. Vincent clapped him on the shoulder and muttered reassuring words. “He is not bleeding so very much. We must hope he did not puncture any viscera. My preliminary examination suggests he stabbed muscle and skin, but not colon. A good thing, that.”

Then one of the nurses patted Gabriel on the forearm, and he let her, though inside, he recoiled at the touch. She murmured words of encouragement and hope, and led him to a small parlor at the front of the house, one he knew was reserved for visitors who were considering damning their relatives to this place. She promised to return once they knew something of Geoffrey’s condition.

He did not want to wait. He wanted to fling open the doors and run as fast and as far as he could. But he only thanked her, his mask firmly in place, revealing none of the nervous energy that coursed through his veins. Only an hour more, perhaps two. He must only wait for the news that Geoffrey would live. And then he would be away. He would be free. It would not do for him to flee through the doors now, with his brother injured. They would think it odd. He was certain of that.

Instead, he paced, and after a time, peered through the open door to determine who was about. There was no one in the passage and so he hurried from the room and took the stairs and corridors on a path familiar and known. He went to his bedroom and collected Sebastian’s letters. He had saved them all these years. They had been his link to sanity for a very long while, and he would not leave them here. Could not leave them here.

Then he returned to the room at the front of the house. Pulling aside the curtains, he looked out at the gathering clouds, charcoal edged and heavy. Sunlight had marked the day he came here; clouds marked the day he would leave. Beautiful, heavy gray clouds.

Less than an hour later, Dr. Vincent came to him, his hair standing on end, lines bracketing either side of his mouth.

“I am terribly sorry to say your brother has relapsed in a most horrific way. The news of your parents’ deaths has driven him beyond his ability to bear. The circulation to his brain is clearly disrupted. He will need extensive treatment.” He drew a deep breath and squared his shoulders as though in preparation for the task ahead.

“But he is alive,” Gabriel said.

“Yes. Yes. The wound was not so serious as it appeared. Not very deep. I suspect it was the presence of previous scar tissue there that slowed his thrust. I have every confidence that he will recover. Physically, that is.”

“I cannot tell you how pleased I am to hear it,” Gabriel said. “May I see him?”

“Of course. Of course. I will take you there now. But…” Dr. Vincent’s voice trailed away.

“Go on,” Gabriel urged.

“But I think perhaps it might be best if you not visit him for a time. Until his state is more balanced. You understand?”

“I do.”
I had not intended to visit him, ever
. “Only let me see him for a moment now.”

They made their way to a small room with a narrow wooden table. Geoffrey lay upon it, a white bandage stretched around his torso. He was mumbling to himself, his eyes hazy and unfocused. Gabriel had no doubt they had fed him opium. For the pain, or perhaps to make him docile.

He glanced at Dr. Vincent and then stepped closer, leaning down so his lips were directly beside his brother’s ear. “Have no fear, Geoffrey. I vow on my life that I will do everything for you, exactly as you would do, and have always done, for me.”

The he covered his face as though overcome by emotion and backed from the room to the sound of Geoffrey’s screams.

He arrived at Cairncroft Abbey, a stranger in his own home. He knew things from Geoffrey’s endless talk. The cook was Mrs. Corkle, a new arrival. The housekeeper was Mrs. Bell, who had been at Cairncroft all those years ago. Geoffrey had clearly found it amusing that she despised both him and Madeline, and favored Sebastian, who visited on any occasion he was on English soil. Gabriel was glad of the housekeeper’s sentiment. It would make his own distance and reserve less noticeable.

The rest would come eventually. The basics of agriculture and accounting and the business of running an estate, Gabriel felt relatively confident of, for he had gleaned knowledge by reading the books Geoffrey had brought to him over the years. His brother had meant those boring tomes as a cruel joke. Gabriel felt certain he had never dreamed they would be welcomed.

As he stood on the drive looking up at the darkened windows, the door flew open and his cousin Madeline came tearing down the stairs, her blond hair tumbling in loose ringlets, her blue eyes sparkling. In that moment, she was pretty. He had never thought her so before, but as she looked at him, her face alight as though he was the sun and moon, he was struck by the realization that she adored him.

No. Not him. Geoffrey.

She adored the imposter who had stood in his shoes these many years. How many? He could not say. He thought he might be nineteen or twenty years old, but he was not certain.

Madeline came to him now and put her hands in his, and held them as she said, “Gabriel, welcome home.”

She stared into his face, tipped her head to the side, and slowly her smile faded. The breeze ruffled her hair.

“Gabriel?”

“Yes, cousin. I have come home.”

Her brow creased. Then she gasped and fell back a step, tearing her hands from his grasp to press them against her breast.

“Gabriel?” she whispered again.

“Yes,” he said, suddenly certain that she
knew
. He was not the cousin who had lived here with her all these years. He was not the man she had expected to greet here on the drive beneath the blanket of cloud.

“Glad to see me, cousin?” he asked.

She was panting now, quick shallow breaths, and her face was chalk white.

“Did you kill him?” she whispered.

No, I only buried him alive in the very grave he dug for me.
“Shall we go indoors?” he asked and offered his arm.

Madeline’s eyes narrowed and her jaw tightened. He could read her expression as nothing other than hate. With a cry, she whirled and ran, up the steps, through the door, her cries trailing behind.

“Well, there’s a homecoming,” he said, and smiled. He was free. At last, he was free.

Cairncroft Abbey, England, April 1828

Catherine sat in the middle of Gabriel’s massive bed, her arms wrapped around her bent knees. She wore only Gabriel’s shirt, for warmth. He lay on his side, facing her, his fingers curled possessively about her ankle, his words hovering, ghostly, between them though his story was done.

He had not told her everything. She knew that with certainty. At times, he had paused in the telling and stared at her, seeming to look far into the distance. Perhaps into the past.

“This is more than I have ever told another living soul,” he said, and the look he gave her was indecipherable, cool and remote, completely at odds with the baring of his soul and the secrets he had entrusted to her.

But perhaps that was the point. Perhaps he feared her reaction and held himself remote. Protected.

She would do the same.

“I know.” She did. He was not a man to bestow his trust easily. Yet he bestowed an enormous measure of it on her.

“Do you think me a monster? A madman?” He stroked his fingers up her calf and down again, then closed them about her ankle once more. “A murderer?” he continued.

She thought he waited for her to flinch away, to cringe in disgust or horror.

“Are you?” she asked.

“To the former, I would say ‘perhaps.’ To the latter”—he shifted, dropped his gaze—“I should think you would like to hear me say ‘no.’”

He kept himself still, utterly motionless, and she chose her words with care. “Am I to understand that you neither deny nor accept the appellations of madman and monster, but hesitate to refute”—she chewed her lower lip, faltering, and finally finished on a whisper—“hesitate to deny the last?”

His lashes lowered, lifted, his amber gaze pinning her, and his fingers tightened around her ankle as though he wanted to hold her there in his bed regardless of her possible reaction to his coming revelation. Foolish man. She would not flee no matter what he said. His crimes could be no worse than her own.

“Dr. Bradley meant to do it. To drain away my blood nearly unto death. There was no reasoning with him, though I tried. I meant to simply twist his neck and kill him”—another look through his lashes, measuring her expression. She only watched him and waited, certain that if she betrayed any emotion at all, it would not be she who fled this bed, but he—“But in the end, I tried reason instead. But Bradley would not be reasoned with. He pulled his whistle to his lips, the dreadful whistle that would summon the nurses and other doctors, and I stepped forward. To intimidate? Certainly. To push him? I believe so. But I shall never know with certainty. He backed away and tumbled to his death all of his own volition.”

He shrugged then, a lazy roll of muscle under smooth skin. “I could not bear the death he planned for me, strapped in that chair with the wooden box over my head, and the knives slicing me until I bled and bled and closed my eyes and floated away with no fight whatsoever.” He made a soft, mocking laugh. “I went to Hanham House like a lamb to the slaughter. I refused to die the same way.”

“Yes,” she said, and reached down to close her fingers around his where they yet curved about her ankle, holding him where he held her.

His gaze jerked up, glittering and bare.

And then he was on her, a surge of power and grace, tumbling her back in the sheets so he was pressed against her, hot skin and hard muscle. Thigh to thigh, tousled golden hair falling forward to brush her cheeks as he pressed his mouth to hers.

His fingers slid into her hair, holding her, cradling her, his body a solid weight against her, his mouth seeking, hungry.

Sinew and muscle and hot skin. She let her hands roam down his wide back to the firm swell of his buttocks, and she opened to him, kissed him as fiercely as he kissed her. Taking. Giving. A melding of tongues and breath and soft, desperate sounds of need.

He took her roughly, plunging deep inside her, and there was pleasure in that, bone-deep, soul-searing pleasure that made her moan and writhe. He kissed her neck and closed his teeth on her, then closed his lips on hers, stealing her breath, her thoughts, her heart.

There was a wildness in this, a primitive dominion, and with his hands on her buttocks and hers on his, she climaxed with brutal suddenness, and he was there with her, crying out as she cried out, harsh masculine sounds that only pushed her higher. The world dropped away, and she was left breathless and shaking, held together only by his arms about her and his lips against her ear, whispering her name like a prayer.

The following night, they supped with Sebastian, and even Madeline came to the dining room, though she mostly sat silent, poking at her meal, watching both her cousins with wide, wary eyes.

She was put out with Catherine.

“You left me alone for so long,” she had complained when Catherine had returned to her late in the afternoon. Then she had looked at Catherine suspiciously. “Where were you all day yesterday and today?”

“I went to fetch my book and…became distracted,” Catherine had replied, her words in no way easing Madeline’s petulant mood.

“I was forced to ring for a maid. And she did not read to me. When I asked for you, she said you were with my cousin, that he said you were not to be disturbed.” Madeline had lifted a book and flung it across the room. “You are not to go to him again! You are not!”

She crossed her arms on her chest and thrust out her lip and spent the next three hours staring sullenly at the wall.

But when a maid had come to request their presence at supper with both Gabriel and Sebastian, Madeline had shocked Catherine by agreeing to join them.

So here they were, the four of them seated at the large dining room table, Madeline silent and pale, Sebastian gregarious and chatty.

And Gabriel. He said little, only watched Catherine with eyes hot and dark, and she felt his heated look like a caress. She tried to keep her own gaze on her plate, fearing that if she looked at him, she would betray herself with a blatantly adoring gaze that would scream to him and anyone else that she was well and truly smitten with him.

Heaven help her.

“Do not tell me he had you read
Frankenstein
.” Sebastian laughed as she raised the topic of the novel Gabriel had lent her. “That book is a monster in itself, a patched together panoply of letters and journals and notes. It is reminiscent of those nesting lacquered boxes I brought home for you from China”—he turned to Madeline, who picked at her meal with listless interest, her eyes dull, dark shadows in the hollows beneath them—“You remember, Madeline, the smaller inside the larger?”

“Yes,” Madeline whispered, but said nothing more.

Sebastian ignored her lack of enthusiasm and turned back to Gabriel and Catherine as he continued. “You see the similarity. There is Victor’s story neatly put inside Walton’s letters, and the monster’s story inside Victor’s.” He laughed. “What a dizzying, stitched-together thing it is. Truths inside truths, and lies inside truths. And”—he laughed again—“you see what I mean.”

Lies inside truths.
From beneath her lashes, Catherine cut a sidelong glance at Gabriel. He watched her, amber-gold eyes reflecting the candlelight.

She wondered what lies he hid inside the truths he told her. What truths he hid with lies. And if it even mattered. He had shared so much of himself with her, yet she wondered if there was still more. She was a master at this game, her skills honed at the edge of a blade held to her throat.

Would she ever know the whole of his story, would she understand all that had made
him
a master, as well?

He had shared so much with her, and yet she sensed there was so much she did not know.

You have a lifetime to come to know him
. The thought shocked and frightened her. There had been no discussion of lifetimes. Only a span of a day and a night, a handful of stolen moments.

“And you, Gabriel? What holds such fascination for you in that book?”

He smiled, a feral baring of teeth, and when he answered, his gaze slid away to light on Madeline, before returning to Catherine.

“The monster escapes,” he said blandly.

Madeline’s fork clattered against her plate.

Yes, of course, there was that. The monster escaped. No wonder he enjoyed the story. She wanted to go to him and wrap him in her arms and tell him he was not the monster, but he would not welcome such action. This was neither the time nor the place.

Across from her, Madeline shuddered, but said nothing. Silence shrouded them, the only sound the clock ticking on the mantel.

“You have been to China?” Catherine asked brightly after some moments, turning her attention back to Sebastian as the turbot in lobster sauce was served.

“There, and many other places. I traveled with my guardian from the time I was a lad often. It was a most unusual education. I used to write of all the wonderful things I saw. Do you recall, Gabriel? One letter for you and one for—” He stopped abruptly and coughed, then lifted his glass and took a sip of wine.

Catherine waited, but he said nothing more, and Gabriel uncharacteristically stepped into the breach. “I recall those letters, Sebastian. They were my…window to a world I was not part of.”

She noted the hesitation, and knew its cause. But did Sebastian? Did Madeline?

Secrets wrapped in secrets.

What must Gabriel’s life have been like, trapped, a prisoner cut off from the world with only his cousin’s letters providing a glimpse of freedom?

She understood what it meant to be trapped, but her own incarceration had not even included letters. Only a barred window and a man who did as he willed with her.

The fragrance of the meal painted the air, aromatic and lush, but the memories tainted her appetite.

Madeline sat with her hands below the table, staring at the plate before her.

“Madeline, the turbot is lovely. Try it,” Catherine coaxed, forcing herself to sample a bit from her own plate.

With her lower lips caught between her teeth, Madeline only looked at her and shook her head. Aware of the two men watching them in puzzled silence, Catherine heaved a sigh. Almost did she exchange her plate for Madeline’s, just to prove the safety of the food, the absence of poison. But that would not suffice. Madeline would still cry poison and still refuse to eat.

She had had quite enough. Her patience was at an end.

Shooting Gabriel a look, daring him to say a single thing, she rose and took Madeline’s plate, switching it for his and his for Madeline’s.

Everyone stared at her, stunned and appalled, and she did not care a whit.

“Now, eat,” she said, and sat and sampled her meal once more as though it was the most natural thing in the world to shuffle plates in the middle of supper.

“What—” Sebastian asked.

“Do not ask,” she interrupted, her tone forbidding him to say another word.

An odd choked sound came from the head of the table, but when she turned to him, she found Gabriel’s face was composed and cool. Except…the corners of his mouth quirked ever so slightly.

Catching her gaze, he raised his brows and said, “It will make no difference.”

Catherine narrowed her eyes at him, willing him to be silent.

“You have traveled extensively, Sebastian,” she said brightly. “But the first day I met you…you said Cairncroft always calls you home.”

The tines of Madeline’s fork scraped on her plate, and Catherine glanced at her to see that she stared at Sebastian with a twisted, pained expression.

“It does call to me,” Sebastian said, exchanging a look with Gabriel.

There was an odd current in the air now, an expectancy, a humming tension.

“Sebastian is my heir.” Gabriel said the words negligently, as though the matter was of little import. But of course, it was.

Sharp claws of dismay gouged her as his words penetrated on a level he could not have intended, a reminder of exactly why what they had shared could never be more than an interlude.

His heir.

Gabriel would need an heir, a
son
. Not his cousin. Gabriel would marry. He would have a wife and child, perhaps more than one. Burning agony twisted a knot in her heart. What had she imagined? That she would live here at Cairncroft indefinitely, taking care of Madeline by day, making love with Gabriel at night?

The absurdity of that sliced her with a jagged blade.

Her place here was temporary, as was her place in his life. How had she allowed herself to imagine otherwise, even for a moment?

Gabriel watched her, and she thought there was a trace of concern in his gaze. It was impossible to know with him. He gave so little away. He opened his mouth as though to speak, when a commotion came from the hallway and Mrs. Bell burst into the dining room, her hair wild about her face, her eyes red-rimmed, her face pale as alabaster.

Both Gabriel and Sebastian came to their feet, Sebastian’s expression wary, Gabriel’s icy.

“They found her. Two boys from the village skulking where they had no business being. They found her.” Mrs. Bell breathed heavily, her open palm pressed to her chest, her shoulders heaving. “Susan Parker. They found her.”

Time stretched like taffy pulled from a pot.

“She is dead. Murdered,” Mrs. Bell whispered.

Horror congealed in Catherine’s throat, making her feel as though she would retch and gag. Susan Parker. Dead. Murdered. How?

It was only when Mrs. Bell turned her face toward her that Catherine realized she had asked the question aloud.

“Her throat was slit”—the housekeeper’s voice broke on the last word and she made a visible effort to rein in her emotion before she continued—“just like…that other girl, so many years ago.” The words were horrific but there was something else. Something in Mrs. Bell’s tone snared Catherine’s interest. The hesitation in her words. Almost as though she had been about to say something other than what she had.

“Only this was worse,” Mrs. Bell continued. “Ever so much worse. Her head was hacked clean off. Her head…” She sank down to her knees with a moan, her eyes rolling back, her limbs trembling.